Written and Directed by Emerald Fennell
Starring Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham and Alison Brie
Running time: 1 hour and 53 minutes
MPAA rating: R for sexual assault, language, drug use and strong violence 

by Rosalie Kicks, Old Sport

“I’m a nice guy.”

I have a bit of an obsessive personality. Take, for example, my discovery of a new film director. I don’t just buy one of their flicks for my collection, I buy the whole damn filmography within minutes of being introduced. Must have them all. Recently I started watching the hit teen soap drama program, Riverdale and now am the proud owner of the entire YA book series based on the show, a Jughead beanie™ and have renamed my pup Li’l Foxie to Li’l Foxiekins. Compulsive behavior such as this has plagued me for most of my life, especially in terms of getting over things. Which brings me to Emerald Fennell’s feature debut, Promising Young Woman. 

I still recall seeing the Promising Young Woman trailer for the first time. It played before a screening of Uncut Gems -a theater packed to the gills with Adam Sandler fans, expecting an Adam Sandler movie and welllll, they were disappointed. After the trailer of Promising Young Woman played, the middle aged white dude next to me let out an elongated sigh and said, “That looks horrible.” Promising Young Woman immediately went on my most anticipated watches for 2020 (oh, surprise! the sighing dude didn’t like Uncut Gems either… philistine). 

It has now been a few weeks since I first watched Promising Young Woman and I can’t stop thinking about it. What may come as a shock is that this is not due to me loving the film that damn much, but instead simply just trying to figure it all out. 

Carey Mulligan plays thirty year old Cassandra, a pre-med school dropout, who works at a trendy coffee shop, lives with her parents and suffers from trauma. At the end of each week she goes out to a bar, pretends she is drunk with hopes of being taken home by a “nice” guy. Each encounter ends up the same, with the “nice” guy attempting to take advantage of her compromised state. Then boom! Like a Harley Quinn hammer to the face, Cassie suddenly awakens from her drunken fugue state and to “nice” guy’s dismay she isn’t drunk at all. Now that Cassie has the upperhand, she isn’t looking to do anything rash, sure, fear has been induced, but what she seeks is something much harder to come by: remorse.For me, Promising Young Woman is more than just a revenge tale or a picture with a strong message, it is about trauma in a defective system. After Cassie’s best friend, Nina experienced a gruesome evening in which she was raped multiple times while intoxicated, Cassie finds herself incapable to move forward. The day no one accepted what happened to Nina was the day that Cassie died. Cassie is essentially the living dead.

Overall, I think what Fennell attempted to do here is really great. Her film got me thinking not just about the many injustices that happen to women everyday because someone chooses to not believe them, as well as the lack of healthcare available to those that find themselves in such dire situations. However, despite the important message I found an unevenness to the film. 

The script had a TV movie feel to me that I couldn’t shake. Lots of convenient coincidences such as everyone from her past all living in the same hometown and for seven years they never ran into one another… until NOW! When Ryan (Bo Burnham) an old chum from what would have been Cassie’s alma mater stumbles into the coffee shop for the first time he is shocked to find her behind the counter. It made me wonder if he just maybe didn’t drink coffee for the past seven years. I mean, how else would he not have gone to a coffee shop that was right up the street from where he worked?

In many respects, the runtime can be blamed- did I really need a several minute montage of Cassie and Ryan falling in love? Nah. What’s even more upsetting about this montage predicament is that this is what I remember most from the film. Prior to that, the story had a more serious tone and Cassie’s objective was clear: retribution. After the montage incident it was as if the entire focus of the film changed. Things got more hokey, including the acting. Cassie’s mission became cloudy. What initially started as a meaningful crusade became a personal take-down fueled by scorn. Her objective of teaching remorse turned into revenge on a bunch of her former college classmates. 

By the end, I was left wondering who exactly this film is for. Last year, when the reboot of Black Christmas was released, the reaction from men was: RAGE. Despite the lackluster reviews, I quite enjoyed this film and know, one day, it will find its place in the sun. The amount of people it pissed off with its message of female empowerment proves it did something right; it managed to get people in the seats that needed to hear it.  With Promising Young Woman, I don’t think that the intended audience are the people that actually need to see this message. Promising Young Woman should have been targeted at that annoyed, middle-aged, white dude that got pissed at the trailer and, instead, it has just ended up preaching to the choir with its muddled messaging.

Promising Young Woman is available to watch Christmas day.